Giving customers tools to buy Canadian

As summer seems to have arrived in Winnipeg with all the subtlety of stepping through the door into a sauna, you might be thinking of a barbecue tonight.

Perhaps you’ve already been shopping, and have picked up a couple of cubes of grass-fed ground beef from the grocery store. “Lean ground beef — grass fed — excellent source of protein. Portioned and freezer-ready for added convenience,” the label says.

But the label says a lot of things. “Prepared in Canada,” it says. There’s a circle in the corner of the package with a maple leaf inside it, the word “Canada” underneath the leaf.

Oh, and in small block letters in both official languages, “Product of New Zealand.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with New Zealand.

But at a time when we’re looking more carefully about what we buy, and when many are making choices to not spend our money on products from tariff-town to the south of us, it’s time for some new clarity.

In Canada, food products carry two different statements about their origins: as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency spells it out “‘Product of Canada’ claims are subject to a higher threshold of Canadian content (98 per cent), while ‘Made in Canada’ claims are subject to a 51 per cent threshold of Canadian content, but should be accompanied by a qualifying statement indicating that the product contains imported content. In both cases, the last substantial transformation of the product must have occurred in Canada.”

Clear enough for government work, perhaps — but also, nowhere near thorough enough to be completely useful for the people picking up packages from grocery shelves.

And grocery shelves can not only be confusing, they can be downright misleading. Canadian grocery chains have been caught identifying products in stores with a maple leaf, even though the products indicate they’re made somewhere else. It all just muddies the water.

There are lessons to be learned elsewhere, and one of the places we could be looking is to Australia. That country requires food labelling that shows how much of a product’s ingredients come from inside or outside Australia — as government regulations spell out, “In addition to a country of origin statement, the marks include an indication of the proportion of Australian ingredients by ingoing weight through text and a bar chart.” You can tell if a product contains less than 25 per cent Australian raw materials, or more than 75 per cent, for example. (A hat-tip here to independent journalist Todd Maffin’s From Far and Wide newsletter, which recently pointed out the blue-ribbon standard of “Made in Australia” rules.)

The clear benefit of the Australian rules is that they spell out not only that ingredients or raw materials come from another country, but what the proportion is of Australian ingredients versus imported ingredients.

It’s all about letting consumers make their own informed decisions — after all, it’s not enough to just talk the talk. And sometimes, even government intentions fade before the work gets done.

Consider Manitoba’s “Buy Canadian” legislation, passed by the legislature last June but still not in place because it hasn’t been officially proclaimed. It is supposed to allow the government to give Canadian suppliers preferential treatment — but isn’t doing it yet.

An excellent example of spending a year talking the talk, without ever beginning to walk the walk.

Given the right tools, Canadian consumers have a better chance of being able to vote with their wallets. So let’s suggest the federal government improve its rules, and make the Canadian-made designation clear.

When you sit down in the sudden Manitoba heat with your tray of barbecued burgers, you should be able to easily tell if it’s Canadian beef, Canadian cheese slices, Canadian ketchup — and the list goes on.